Teacher’s Pet podcast: Sex with students ‘rife at Sydney northern beaches schools’

A class of special needs students told Chris Dawson’s replacement what they saw, as more teachers come forward to blow the lid.

Northern beaches teacher David Clark. Picture: Hollie Adams

Former teachers from schools on Sydney’s northern beaches have revealed it was the norm for colleagues to prey on students for sex in the 1980s, as NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes and his department were yesterday accused of “deafening silence” on the issue.

Beverley Balkind replaced murder suspect Chris Dawson as a physical education teacher at Cromer High after his wife, Lyn, vanished in 1982 and says she was shocked to find a culture of acceptance of sexual relationships ­between teachers and students.

One of the classes she took over was made up of “very open, sweet children” with special needs who were not guarded in what they said about Mr Dawson, whose relationship with teenage student Joanne Curtis was widely known.

“They told me when we were in the gym for PE class that I didn’t need to stay in the gym with them,” Ms Balkind told The Australian. “They could just do what they liked because when they had Mr Dawson, he would go to the storeroom with Joanne and leave them alone in the gym to do whatever they wanted.

“I don’t know what shocked me more — that the kids were unsupervised in the gym or that he was doing something nefarious in the storeroom.”

Ms Balkind was speaking publicly for the first time for a new ­episode of The Australian’s investigative podcast series The Teacher’s Pet , released yesterday. The series has revealed that about 20 teachers preyed on students for sex at three northern beaches schools — Cromer High, Beacon Hill High and Forest High — in the 1980s.

Mr Stokes and his department, headed by former ABC managing director Mark Scott, are refusing to detail what action has been taken in response to the scandal.

“This is one for the (department),” a spokesman for Mr Stokes said in a text message yesterday. A statement from the department instructed victims to go to police and said it “does not have the power to investigate former staff members”.

The Australian has reported that child protection investigators have begun contacting former students of northern beaches schools.

Robyn Wheeler, a former Cromer High student who blew the whistle on a “pack” of teachers preying on students, said it now appeared the education department was “doing nothing … The inactivity continues and the ­silence is deafening. They are hopeless.”

NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman responded to calls for Mr Dawson to be prosecuted over his wife’s suspected murder, saying he had requested more information from the Justice Department. “Lynette Dawson’s family have experienced decades of uncertainty and grief and for that I extend them my deepest sympathies,” he said.

Two days after Mr Dawson’s wife went missing, he moved his teenage lover, Ms Curtis, into his home at Gilwinga Drive in Bayview. His intense affair with the teenager had started 14 months earlier, when Joanne was 16.

Mr Dawson abruptly left the school in the months after his wife vanished, with the Education ­Department allowing him to transfer to Beacon Hill High, just 4km away.

Two coroners have found he murdered his wife, but he has not charged and maintains his innocence.

Ms Balkind said offending teachers who were simply moved on were “going to do exactly the same thing”.

“I replaced (Mr Dawson) because he was moved from the school as a disciplinary action, I believe, because he had been misbehaving with one of the senior students,’’ she said.

“When I started at the school I felt that Cromer High School had an accepting attitude of male teachers misbehaving with students, which was a bit of a surprise. Rather than it being a scandal, it was an accepted norm …”

Her husband, David Clark, also a northern beaches schoolteacher, said Mr Dawson’s sexual relationship with a student was no secret.

“That was the reason why Cromer were quite happy to take my wife on as the female and shift him out of the school to somewhere else,’’ Mr Clark said.

“I’ve worked in six different high schools and in five of them there were relationships between students and teachers.”

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